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remember ways to calm himself, but they seemed silly and ineffectual. He
finally managed to hum to himself, to count to fifty, and reached the point
where he could open his eyes again.
Part of him expected to see the escaping mass swallowing the NIL whole,
digesting the walls, the windows, the doors to create one enormous hive
organism that would engulf the Earth. Instead, he saw the perpetual videoloop
on the wall, showing his grandson's birthday party.
The boy laughed and smeared chocolate ice cream on his face. Timothy
and his wife applauded. A younger Parvu stood off to one side, looking
immensely pleased with himself. Idyllic times, in an unreal universe where
nightmares like what he had created in the clean-room could never exist.
Compared to what he had done, Erika's mistake of letting the alien
nanocritters infect them was trivial.
He moaned Sinda's name. He had not talked to her in months. She was out
of touch, off in the wilds somewhere -- could it be possible that she didn't
even know about the Daedalus construction?
Parvu could not face the thought of confessing the magnitude of what he
had done -- he had successfully avoided doing that for days. Perhaps if he
destroyed everything thoroughly enough, no one would have to know. He had had
a full and admirable career. He need not ruin it at the end because of a
single mistake, no matter how large.
He had seen colleagues with distinguished credentials follow the wrong
ideas, use their long-earned fame to publicize crackpot theories, with the
result that their lives' work was dismissed as "lucky guesses." Parvu did not
want to leave that legacy behind for his family.
But everything had gotten out of control. He couldn't understand how it
had turned so bad. He felt sobs rising up again.
If Parvu informed Celeste McConnell, she would destroy the NIL and its
surrounding areas. No question about that -- she would have no other choice.
She would do it without warning, for what good would a warning do? She would
send flyers with napalm, or more likely she would drop another of the
long-stored nuclear warheads and annihilate the entire site. It was the
deepest wasteland of Antarctica -- no one but himself and perhaps a few of
those still at the Mars base camp would be killed.
But Parvu couldn't be sure the flyers would do a thorough enough job.
More likely, McConnell would send in a team to arrest him and take his
research as evidence, charging him with unleashing the hybrids from whatever
meager confinement he had managed to erect.
Perhaps the devastating fail-safe systems could be rigged with a time
delay to trigger the x rays after he had fled outside to where he could be
rescued. But that, too, would be useless.
With his clumsy precautions, Parvu almost certainly carried some of the
first hybrids in his own body, much like Erika's contamination. He had handled
Old Gimp after the rat had been infested with the automata. Any number of
hybrids could have escaped the first time he breached the nanocore containment
-- which was by far his most appalling mistake.
The worst part was, he could not even check his own blood for
infection! All of the analytical apparatus was in the central lab, the
quarantine section.
Unlike Erika, Parvu would never come up with a miracle cure to purge
himself and erase the _thing_ he had created. He had taken too many
inexcusable chances already. He could not afford another one....
Walking on leaden legs, he returned to the observation window. He
thought he heard strange buzzing sounds permeating the NIL, and the air seemed
oppressively warm. He held his breath before looking into the quarantine
chamber.
The reconstructed stool remained standing inside its churning pool of
automata and organic matter. Squirming up the legs of the stool, pulsing on
the bowed surface of the seat, writhing lumps appeared, hints of something
without quite enough information to assemble itself. Yet.
Gnawing his knuckles, Parvu knew exactly what he had to do. Soon. And
he was much too frightened to do it.
--------
PART VII
"He discovers deep things out of darkness and brings to light the
shadow of death."
-- Job 12:22
* * * *
"For those who believe it's time for mankind to leave the cradle, the
most exciting promise of nanotechnology will be to build interstellar ships
and robotic space voyagers."
-- Grant Fjermedal, _Final Frontier_, May/June 1990.
--------
*CHAPTER 33*
MOONBASE COLUMBUS
"We left the stereochip right there so we could watch every detail,"
Newellen said, paying no attention to where he was driving the rover. "But if
somebody decides to trigger those nukes, we won't see a thing. The prompt
gamma rays from the nuclear explosions will fry the chip's circuits before we
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